Existence and Uniqueness of Time-Periodic Physically Reasonable Navier-Stokes Flow Past a Body

Let be a three-dimensional exterior domain of class C^2,, 0<<1. Assume that a Navier-Stokes liquid is moving in under the action of a body force F that is time-periodic of period T, and that the velocity of the liquid is zero at spatial infinity. In this paper we show that, if F satisfies suitable conditions, and its norm, in appropriate function spaces, is sufficiently small, there is at least one time-periodic strong solution. Furthermore, the velocity field v of such a solution decays to zero for large |x| as |x|^–1 and its spatial gradient decays as |x|^–2, both uniformly in time. In addition, the pressure p decays like |x|^–2 and its gradient like |x|^–3, for almost all t[0,T]. In the special case where F is time-independent, these solutions are also time-independent and coincide with Finns physically reasonable solutions [4]. Moreover, we show that our time-periodic solutions are unique in a very large class, namely, the class of time-periodic weak solutions satisfying the energy inequality and with corresponding pressure fields verifying mild summability conditions in ×[0,T].